On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 8:12 PM, Bradley M. Kuhn <[email protected]> wrote: > Felipe Contreras wrote: >> It's perfectly fine for developers to enforce the license of *their* >> code, that is enforced by copyright law, I *never* said otherwise. But >> developers shouldn't weigh on the code of other developers in the >> project, or even other projects. > > If you agree that copyright law gives absolute licensing power to copyright > holders, then it should be obvious that copyright holders can ask > for whatever they want as part of a license reinstatement. It's their > prerogative under the current legal regime. As such, if they want to ask > the license violators to stand on their heads for week before they can have > a GPL license back on their copyrights, the copyright holders can so ask. > > As you'd stated elsewhere in the thread, and the point I think you are > eluding to again in the text quoted above is: in the past, some of the > requests the copyright holders of BusyBox who have done enforcement were > unreasonable, in your view. I respectfully disagree with your > opinion, but I'm not going to agree that it was illegitimate for BusyBox > copyright holders to do that. Indeed, you've offered no evidence that > such action was legally invalid. Indeed, many of our arguments about the > power of copyright holders to decide a license supports that position.
This is exactly what I argued: it's legal to ask for *unreasonable* demands, such as force compliance with all other GPL projects, whether their developers demand enforcement or not. You said Conservancy doesn't do that, but you don't want to make a promise of that publicly for companies to be at easy with busybox. In fact your opinions suggest otherwise; given the situation you would resort to this, because you think it's good that companies get punished for not complying with the GPL license of any code, even the code where developers don't care about enforcement. I don't understand why you bring this back again, I was the oen arguing this was *legal*, not good. >> Yes, so what? Copyright law can evolve to the needs of today, but it >> would still protect the developers, no the users. > > That's an opinion, and I don't agree with it. No, it's not an opinion, it's a fact. "Mitt Romney _can_ win the presidential election of USA" <- that's a fact "I think Obama will win" <- that's an opinion. Everything _can_ happen, regardless of _you_ opinion, it is _possible_ that copyright law will evolve in ways you don't approve, that's a *fact*. > I don't think > copyright law "protects" anyone; I believe it's a legal system that > exists, that is usually used for the detriment of society but can, when > done correctly, be used to advance useful goals of freedom of users and > programmers alike. That is an opinion. The fact is that copyright law was designed to protect the *authors*, whether it actually does it or not is a matter of opinion. >> In a court of law what the FSF intended is irrelevant, > > That's not strictly true, in fact. The FSF may well be called as an > expert witness to opine on its intent of the license. For example, in GPL > court cases for Conservancy, I've often been asked about my work at FSF, > and it was deemed relevant by the judge. Yes, but relevant why? Maybe to determine your credentials and biases. In a contract it might be relevant to understand what the parties understood when they read or wrote some text, but ultimately what matters is what is written, because that's what they signed. A license is very similar. You can't say in a trial, oh, I wrote X, but what I meant is Y. That's not how licenses work. Otherwise Facebook would be able to do many things they didn't actually write in their EULA. >> Opinions, desires, and intents are irrelevant. > > Actually, all those things can often be relevant. "licensor's intent", in > particular, is of great importance to federal copyright judges in the USA. > Have you read any USA copyright case law related to software? Did you > read the Jacobsen v. Katzer decision? I am the licensor, not the FSF. -- Felipe Contreras _______________________________________________ busybox mailing list [email protected] http://lists.busybox.net/mailman/listinfo/busybox
